Originally a comment by DrMcCoy on When openness is taken as an absolute.
as few as 1.5% of open source programmers are women […] chauvinism, assumptions of inferiority, and outrageous examples of impropriety (including sexual harassment at conferences where programmers gather) to a lack of women mentors and role models
A shame. really. :/
This is why I’m glad at least GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women exists. There should be more programs like that, though.
But the outcry on reddit and Phoronix when it was announced that the GNOME Foundation had a temporary cash flow problem. People yelling that the GNOME Foundation was wasting their money on that “useless” program and how they’re using donations to push their political agenda. There were even personal attacks against Karen M. Sandler, who initiated that program a few years ago and led it until moving on to the Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this month. And there’s people claiming that she “jumped ship” or was “pushed off”.
If those people had read the announcement, they would have seen that the actual issue was quite simpler: The GNOME Foundation doesn’t even pay most of the interns of the outreach program. Instead, the money comes from other companies, like Red Hat and Google. Unfortunately, some companies didn’t pay in a timely manner with the intern’s contract, so the GNOME Foundation had to front the money for a time. Apart from that, the outreach program seems to be ticking along rather nicely and growing.
As for Karen Sandler, while I don’t know her personally, I am following a podcast (“Free as in Freedom”) she does with Conservancy’s President Bradley M. Kuhn; and occasionally lurking in the related IRC channel; and read Bradley’s blog. And from what I gather, it looks to me like she was rather “pulled” by Bradley, than “pushed” from the GNOME Foundation. She has been a pro-bono attorney for Conservancy for years and she’s friends with Bradley, who has complained about his high workload in the past.
All this fuss about nothing, the “you got politics in my programming” (really, this is the Free Software, it was political from the beginning), the “she looks like a fat ugly feminist”, the “women just choose to not contribute”, the “don’t waste money on this sexist outreach”… It’s reallyfrustrating. 